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 Lisa had not planned on going back to school at thirty-eight. The plan had been simpler than that. Work part-time while the kids were young, go back full-time when they were older, finish the accounting degree she had started and abandoned at twenty-two when life had intervened in the specific way that life intervenes when you are twenty-two and not quite sure what you are doing yet. The kids were now twelve and fourteen. She was thirty-eight. The timing was finally right. What she had not planned on was college algebra. She had known it was in the curriculum. She had seen it on the course list when she enrolled and had noted it the way you note something you will deal with when you get to it. She got to it in the spring of 2026 and discovered that dealing with it was more complicated than she had anticipated. The last time she had done algebra she was seventeen. That was twenty-one years ago. Whatever foundational fluency she had developed at seventeen had not been exercised ...

 Tom had logged over a million miles. Not metaphorically. Actually. One million, two hundred thousand miles of American highway over twenty-two years behind the wheel of a semi. He had driven through blizzards in Montana and desert heat in Arizona and rain so heavy in Louisiana that the road disappeared entirely and you just aimed for where you thought the road should be and trusted your experience. He had never once gotten lost in a way he could not find his way out of. College algebra had him lost in a way he could not find his way out of. He enrolled in the spring of 2026 because the trucking company he had worked for since he was twenty-four had been acquired, and the new ownership had made it clear in various indirect ways that the future belonged to people with degrees. He was forty-six. He had a GED and a commercial license and more practical knowledge about logistics than most people with supply chain management degrees. He did not have a degree. The community college p...